JetBrains Rider vs. Microsoft Visual Studio

I think it's the best IDE nowadays for game development, mainly in Unreal, but it's also the best one in cost/benefit for Unity. It might not work for people who prefer a more lightweight IDE, it's still pretty heavy and its indexing takes around 2~3GB of ram, but it's worth the quick indexing and IntelliSense.

Incentivized

It's useful for app development, debugging, and testing. I've been using it for two years and have seen it grow into a fantastic tool. All of the features, NuGet packages, and settings that enable different types of projects are fantastic. It also has a connection to Azure DevOps and Git. It's a fantastic product that's simple to use.

• Helps you refactor your code into more readable and more efficient code.
• Highly customizable UI, including color themes, shortcut key remappings, and the ability to put any Window, Toolbar, or Docked tab anywhere you want, even on second screens. Additionally, this functionality can be customized per project, not just globally for the whole machine.
• More control over Git. Visual Studio just has the basics, but mostly all that is needed is for git repositories. It gets the job done., but Rider takes it one step further and gives you most of what you can do on the command line's simple, easy to access menu options.
• If you use TeamCity, then you have complete and full integration into your TeamCity build server!
• You can double tap your control key and get a quick pop up to instantly run any command. Double tap shift and you can search your entire project, filenames, AND text and filter that search!

Incentivized

• Rock solid intellisense. For C# and VB.Net code, the intellisense provided by Visual Studio is hands down the best. If you find that you have a hard time remembering parameters of functions, or what object names were, the intellisense will rescue you and help me be an efficient developer.
• Super fast and simple to use debugger for C# and VB. Everything in the debugger is handed to you on a silver platter. When you stop on a break point, it immediately shows you the local variables, the call stack, and even your current memory usage. Setting up watch variables is super simple and you can even make breakpoints conditional so it will only stop on certain conditions.
• Hides the tedious tasks. There are quite a few things like publishing, creating click once deployments, and adding/removing settings in the project files that can be really time consuming when trying to do it by hand (such as if you don't have access to Visual Studio and you need to make changes). Visual Studio hides all the tedium from you by making nice point and click interfaces to get things done quickly.

Incentivized

• Things are starting to get slower as the IDE grows
• Blazor integration is a bit lacky
• Blazor hot reload could be automatically applied instead of having to click on Apply link/button.

Incentivized

• Certain settings and features can sometimes be challenging to locate. The interface isn't always intuitive.
• Sometimes there are too many ways to do the same thing. For example, users can quickly add a new workspace in Source Control Explorer when a local path shows as "Not Mapped," but it doesn't indicate that the user might want to check the dropdown list of workspaces. The shortcut of creating a new workspace by clicking on the "Not Mapped" link can lead to developers creating too many workspaces and causing workspace management to become unwieldy. If the shortcut link were removed, the user would be forced to use the Workspace dropdown. While it can add an extra step to the process, workspaces would be managed more easily, and this would enforce consistency. At the very least, there should be a high-level administrative setting to hide the shortcut link.

Incentivized

Due to the performance and productivity benefits we get with Rider, we will continue to use it for the foreseeable future.

Incentivized

VS is the best and is required for building Microsoft applications. The quality and usefulness of the product far out-weight the licensing costs associated with it.

Incentivized

It's easy to learn while still advanced. It has smart tricks up it's sleeve that you have to find out but that is to be expected. It has a modern new UI that some will find too compact, but it took me just a day to like it more than to switch back.

Incentivized

The thing I like the most is Visual Studio doesn't suffer from Microsoft's over eager marketing department who feel they need to redesign the UI (think Office and windows) which forces users to loose large amounts of productivity having to learn software that they had previously known.

Incentivized

The support forums and knowledge base are extensive and the JetBrains support staff respond quickly to new posts and help resolve issues. There is also a publicly accessible issue tracking system, which allows you to stay on top of any bug fixes or enhancement requests.

Incentivized

Between online forums like StackOverflow, online documentation, MSDN forums, and the customer support options, I find it very easy to get support for Visual Studio IDE when I need it. If desired, one can also download the MSDN documentation about the IDE and have it readily available for any support needs.

Incentivized

It’s a great free tool but not as enhanced as IntelliJ platform that JetBrains Rider has. Debugging and access to database is not as comfortable to use. Sure, you can save money on IDE, but may need to spend it on sleeping and stress relief pills.

Incentivized

I personally feel Visual Studio IDE has [a] better interface and [is more] user friendly than other IDEs. It has better code maintainability and intellisense. Its inbuilt team foundation server help coders to check on their code then and go. Better nugget package management, quality testing and gives features to extract TRX file as result of testing which includes all the summary of each test case.

• Writing clearer C# code based on refactoring suggestions
• Avoiding some obscure bugs that Rider has flagged in the IDE that would have taken a lot of time and effort to find and fix through testing
• Cost of licenses, though the benefits outweigh the costs

Incentivized

• Using the integration between Visual Studio and our source control service, the cost of re-work and losing code is drastically reduced.
• Paid versions of Visual Studio enable developers to be so much more productive than hacked-together open source solutions that it's hard to imagine developing in Windows without it.
• When combined with support subscriptions and the vast array of free online help options available, Visual Studio saves our developers time by keeping them coding and testing, not wasting their time trying to guess their way out of problems or spend endless hours online hoping to find answers.

Incentivized